No matter how you look at it, the devastation of Gaza requires urgent and serious reconstruction. Homes, hospitals, schools, farms, cultural heritage sites and basic infrastructure are in ruins. Entire neighborhoods were erased. Humanitarian needs are undeniable. But urgency must not become an excuse for illusions, spectacle and political shortcuts.
The contrast between rhetoric and reality could not be more stark. The killings in Gaza continued as US President Donald Trump and world leaders gathered in Davos, Switzerland, to sign the charter of a so-called peace commission and announce an impressive reconstruction plan.
No fewer than 480 Palestinians have been killed since the ceasefire took effect on October 10. Four of them were killed on the very day the charter was signed by 19 Cabinet members and state representatives, many of whom were less interested in the Gaza issue and far more interested in being seen alongside President Trump.
Against that backdrop, this board’s carefully staged optimism feels more like a performance than a transformation. It resembles a sandbox where registrants can build sandcastles with Trump, only to be washed away by the first wave of reality.
The proposal may seem impressive and hopeful, but it is structurally empty. They sidestep the real drivers of the conflict, marginalize the Palestinian Authority, privilege Israel’s military priorities over civilian recovery, and align uncomfortably with long-standing efforts to maintain the occupation, displace Palestinians, and deny the right of return to those forced from their homes in 1948 and 1967.
Gaza is not a real estate prospectus
The bright vision of his aide and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, treats Gaza not as a traumatized society emerging from devastating violence but as a blank investment canvas for luxury housing, commercial districts, data hubs, seaside promenades and ambitious gross domestic product (GDP) targets.
This is more like a real estate prospectus than a rehabilitation plan. Development language replaces political reality. Polished presentation replaces entitlement. The market replaces justice.
But Gaza is not a failed startup looking for venture capital. It is home to more than 2 million Palestinians who have endured decades of siege, displacement, repeated wars and chronic insecurity. Reconstruction cannot succeed if it is divorced from their lived experience, or if it treats Gaza as an economic asset open to speculative investment, primarily by radical Zionists, rather than as a human community struggling to maintain its identity and social structure.
For many families, even a modest home in an official refugee camp in Gaza represented a fragile bridge worth holding onto, a step toward an eventual return to the place from which they were forced to flee, what is today known as Israel.
These homes were valued not for their comfort or market value, but for the social networks they maintained and their symbolic connections to continuity, memory, and political assertion. Palestinians are therefore less likely to be swayed by offers of glittering towers and luxurious villas, or the promise of a “market economy” under siege. Their experience over the past decades has taught them that no level of material improvement can replace deeper aspirations tied to dignity, grit and the right of return.
A future designed without Palestinians
The obvious flaw in the Trump plan is that Palestinians themselves are systematically excluded from shaping their vision for the future. These plans are announced in elite conference halls and never discussed with the people whose neighborhoods have been flattened.
Without Palestinian ownership, legitimacy collapses. Experience in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries has repeatedly shown that externally imposed reconstruction, no matter how well-branded, reproduces the very power imbalances that fuel instability in the first place.
Equally troubling is that the plan deliberately avoids addressing the root causes of Gaza’s suffering: occupation, blockade, and military control. We cannot rebuild sustainably while continuing to preserve and finance machines that repeatedly destroy what has been built.
No amount of concrete investment, branding, or foreign investment can replace a political solution. Territories that remain militarily besieged, economically blockaded and politically conquered can never achieve lasting recovery.
You cannot thrive in a cage. The European Union learned this lesson the hard way through the multiple recovery cycles it has funded for the Gaza Strip, but it may help explain why none of its member states could rush to join the Council, despite being able to afford the permanent council fees and the political motivation to forge friendlier relations with President Trump in light of the Ukraine war and his threats to Greenland.
Supporting Israeli military control through spatial redesign
There is also a serious risk that the proposed physical design of Gaza will entrench Israeli military strategy rather than restore Palestinian livelihoods. The plan envisages buffer zones, subdivisions and so-called “green spaces and corridors” that internally divide the territory.
This type of spatial engineering would facilitate surveillance, control, and rapid military access. Urban planning will become security architecture. Civilian geography will be transformed into military space. What will be sold as modernization will constitute a sophisticated containment system, similar to the illicit payment networks and road networks in the occupied West Bank.
A focus on reclaiming land from the sea using debris could repeat the problems of rebuilding Beirut after the civil war. There, the lack of outstanding ownership claims in newly reclaimed areas attracted disproportionate investment, ultimately allowing elites to appropriate the city’s waterfront and withdraw it from public use.
The demographic impact of this plan is equally profound. Moving Gaza’s population center south, closer to Egypt and away from Israeli settlements, would quietly change the political and social center of gravity of Palestinian life.
While it may alleviate Israel’s security concerns, it would come at the expense of Palestinian continuity, identity, and territorial coherence. Demographic engineering under the banner of reconstruction raises serious ethical concerns and risks externalizing Gaza’s long-term humanitarian burden to neighboring countries. This may also help explain Egypt’s decision to be absent from the signing ceremony and limit the participation of its intelligence community leadership.
No political theater can replace freedom.
The Peace Commission itself also deserves careful scrutiny. Although its brand suggests neutrality and collective control, its political framework remains highly individualized, with Trump at the center, and there is little clarity about how it is intended to operate in practice.
This is not a multilateral peacebuilding mechanism as envisaged by UN Security Council Resolution 2803 of November 2025. It’s political theater. Peace mechanisms that are rooted in individuals rather than institutions or international law rarely survive political change.
At the heart of all this lies the familiar but dangerous assumption that economic growth can substitute for political rights. History teaches the opposite. People do not resist simply because they are poor. They resist because they lack dignity, safety, freedom of expression, and self-determination. No master plan can avoid this reality. No skyline can compensate for political exclusion.
This does not mean Gaza must wait for complete peace before rebuilding. We must proceed with recovery as soon as possible. But rebuilding requires empowering Palestinians rather than redesigning their constraints. Rather than embedding management systems in concrete or zoning maps, they must be dismantled. Rather than superficially repackaging the aftermath of destruction, we must confront its political roots.
Until these foundations exist, the peace commission and Kushner’s vision risk becoming exactly what they resemble: a form of sandcastle diplomacy. Impressive to the world’s masses, comforting to the elites, destined to be washed away when the first serious waves of political reality arrive.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
